Stryker and Daub: A conversation on 'Changing Gender'
Stryker
From the groundbreaking trans scholar Susan Stryker, the new book Changing Gender is a provocative call to reconsider the story we tell about gender itself.
Stryker, a distinguished visitor at the Clayman Institute, sits down with Director Adrian Daub for a conversation about an impasse in trans discourse, approaching writing with a sense of discovery, and the dynamism inherent in interrogating or changing the concept of gender.
Daub: You start the book on Stanford’s campus, on the day in 2023 when anti-trans talking head Matt Walsh came to town with his movie “What Is a Woman?” It's almost like the eve of battle and you're walking the two camps. You start out at the QSpot and then walk to the Matt Walsh event. And the interesting thing in that first chapter is that the debate, you sense, is stuck.
Stryker: I think there is a sense of things being stuck on both sides. As much personal sympathy and support as I feel and have for trans students and trans scholars, and for a field of scholarship that I've done my best to help promote and develop, it does feel like there is a certain kind of impasse in the discourse. It's like two screaming camps that are basically going, you know, “You're wrong.” “No, you're wrong, I'm right.” “No, I'm right, you're wrong.”
Daub: At Walsh’s presentation, you became fascinated by something he said: that gender was a grammatical term that had been hijacked by activists. What struck you about his little history lesson?
Stryker: Obviously, I think Matt Walsh is an idiot. But he's a semi-educated idiot on these topics, and I was provoked by Matt Walsh saying something that I didn't think he knew or thought about and it provoked something in me. Matt Walsh [brought] up the idea that the concept of gender is something that comes out of grammar, and then he makes an argument about how it's been misapplied by social scientists and perverts and pedophiles, and turned into a false ideology, blah, blah, blah.
Daub: Right, Changing Gender is not primarily about people in history we might call transgender.
Stryker: The book’s pitch is: Let's go on this historical excavation that is not about the history of people who've changed gender, but a history of the concept that we use to think about these things. And then that's what the book becomes. It becomes an ongoing conversation with examples that move us toward, well, this is what gender has been. This is what we've used it to do. This is kind of how it works grammatically. This is the way it got taken up in social sciences. This is how it becomes conspiracy theory.
This is how changing gender at the conceptual level – it really is a way of thinking about how we change our understanding of who we are as a subject, and what kinds of actions we can take in the world, and how we make sense of our meaning. It's just, let's change gender.
Daub: You make the point that the grammatical sense of gender is indeed older, but that someone like Matt Walsh is wrong in thinking that it only recently got applied to embodied social life. Rather, as you point out, it spills over into the social with some frequency, and it usually does when what we today would call gender expression hits some sort of crisis point or comes under pressure or gets reconfigured. So people reach for the social aspects of this linguistic concept, not all the time, but when there's pressure.
Stryker: The more we focus on the idea that what we call gender is always a kind of semantic, semiotic practice of making sense of objects by categorizing and relating them, like just be really abstract about it, the less break there is between grammatical and what I call psychosocial gender. We never get outside that meaning-making practice. It becomes a way of avoiding some really stupid impasses in the current debate, where you've got people going, “sex matters, sex realism, biological realism, not this fake gender ideology.” That is just such a wrong way of framing the question. Nobody is talking about, “some bodies have this gamete and other bodies have that gamete.” That is not the point. The question is, what is the social practice by which we make sense of another person's being, right?
Daub: We're not having gamete debates, we're having bathroom debates.
Stryker: Exactly.
And so to just lean into what I think of as the humanities side of the debate, the meaning-making cultural side of the debate – let's just say we know that there's biological difference. We make sense of ourselves by attributing certain meaning to actually existing biological difference, and it has absolutely nothing to do at some level with how we recognize another person's personhood.
Daub: You are so incredibly erudite on this topic, and you really go into tremendous depth in your book. At the same time, it's interesting that it's a book of self-discovery, that in some way when you start the book, you do not know what you're going to end up teaching your reader. Why is it important for you to be seen learning? In some way, you're the historian of trans people in America. It would have been easy to do the ex-cathedra-like summa of your work, but you don't do that.
Stryker: I feel allergic to that somehow. It's just a style. It's much more of an, Adrian, let's sit down in a restaurant and have a beverage and talk about stuff. I may know where I'm coming from on something, but I think the professorial mode can just be so... I don't want to profess, I want to...convey that sense of surprise and discovery.
I like to tell a story narratively. That’s just sort of my style of being in the world. I don't want to position myself in a place of authority, even if I feel like I might have some. I just have a different way of saying what I think is important. I like to drop those little truth bombs that are poetically and lyrically expressed, where people are like, oh, I see something differently now, rather than, let me explain exactly how this works. I think it's a more literary way, rather than a sort of expository, pedagogical way.
Daub: It strikes me that that's also the central conceit of the book's structure: Ultimately, the book has a great sense of dynamism, which the Matt Walshes of the world just can't match, because to them, sex, well, just is what it is. It's a tautological reassertion, claiming that somehow it's always been this way, and only this conspiracy of trans people has now hijacked it.
Your book explores the fact that sex and gender are dynamic, the fact that this stuff is in flux. And your book also models that kind of dynamism and mobility in its very structure.
Stryker: I think that's exactly right. To just say, meaning is not fixed. At some level that does open up for me into a question about metaphysics or onto epistemology…is the state of the universe and the cosmos, our being in it, is it fixed and the meaning is determined in advance? Or is there something dynamic and vital and ongoing in just the sheer material experience of being alive? The latter feels true to me. There is something in it that's about feeling. It's about feeling that something is in the direction of being alive, lively, engaging, dynamic. That just feels better than saying everything has been figured out in advance, mapped out in the future, you're just sort of following around.
And that's exactly what sets off the religiously motivated right wing: to them, it's this willful, sinful subject trying to refuse God's plan for humanity. And my response is: I don't believe in that God, and what you’re warning against actually sounds beautiful and lively and wonderful to me. It is my way of being in the world, and I do no harm to others.
This conversation was edited for length and clarity.
